#AMSACon Rewind—”Criminal Justice Reform: Why This is Our Movement” from AMSACon 2020

AMSA’s Convention & Exposition, or AMSACon, has been going strong 70 plus years. AMSACon is where future physicians convene with health care experts, innovators and trailblazers for a 3-day hive of training, networking and activism.

AMSACon features speakers who are pushing the field of medicine forward to better serve patients and improve the world we live in. There’s no better example than Dr. Edjah Nduom, who spoke with us for AMSACon 2020 and our later panel on Racial Inequity in American Healthcare. We’re eagerly awaiting his session at #AMSACon2021, ready to hear what this past year has meant for his organization Physicians for Criminal Justice Reform (PfCJR), and what we can do next. This year, with the worsening of COVID-19 for the incarcerated population and continued needless death of Black individuals at the hands of law enforcement, the topic of criminal justice reform and the eradication of racism in healthcare and beyond is an even more urgent topic.

At last year’s AMSACon 2020, the first to go virtual in the face of COVID-19, Dr. Nduom shared the start of his journey in realizing his calling to work towards criminal justice reform. Sign up here to receive the full recording of Dr. Nduom’s 2020 session, and to receive updates about #AMSACon2021. Read a summary of the past session below, and catch Dr. Nduom at #AMSACon2021.

On Founding Physicians for Criminal Justice Reform

Eric Garner was killed in 2014. He was suffocated by NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo during an arrest based on the suspicion of Garner selling single cigarettes from packs. His last words “I can’t breathe” became the rallying cry of a nation of people hurt and angered by this unnecessary and unjust death of a Black man at the hands of police.

The same year saw the death of John Crawford, III. Dr. Nduom shared, “John Crawford was an even younger man [than Garner]. He was 20 years old; he was in Walmart in an open carry state. So you could walk around with an AR 15 and really would be nothing the police could do, and he was just looking at BB guns. So he had a BB gun in the store. Someone called it in, police showed up and on sight shot him down. No questions asked, just assuming that that he was doing something nefarious in that Walmart that day. One of the really hits me Tamir Rice, he was only 12 years old. Had a toy gun in a park someone called saying, hey, I see a kid with a what looks like a toy gun—that part doesn’t get related to the police, and within a millisecond of arriving on the scene, no instructions, etc. he was shot down.”

Dr. Nduom attended the protests that followed these killings and stood in solidarity in his white coat. But he thought there must be more that he could do as a physician to prevent the deaths of Black men, women, and children at the hands of police. He said, “Around the time I read The New Jim Crow and it really opened my eyes to the idea of criminal justice reform really being the most significant civil rights issue of our time.”

“And in my mind. The only way you can get at someone assuming that someone that they see on the street as a criminal is to attack the very notion that there is this large group of criminals in a particular community and in order to do that, you’ve got to reduce mass incarceration.”

He began to gather likeminded physicians, and Physicians for Criminal Justice Reform was born. It was for physicians to stand up against the negative health effects of the criminal justice system; this was one specific thing doctors like Dr. Nduom could do in the face of the system of failures that led to the deaths of the three people listed above—and more.

Physicians for Criminal Justice Reform became a group of physicians who were advocating to remove these damaging consequences from interactions with the criminal justice system—on a foundation of medical ethics.

The principles of medical ethics, and criminal justice reform

“So there are four major principles to medical ethics and these were founded in part a response to something really tragic things that have happened in the history—things that physicians have done to people, things like you know…Henrietta Lacks and the Tuskegee experiment where African Americans were experimented for four years by the Public Health Service.”

Definitions below referenced from the University of Washington Department of Bioethics and Humanities:

Respect for Autonomy

This principle protects patients by ensuring that rational agents are involved in making informed and voluntary decisions about their health. Respect for autonomy is the basis for practices like informed consent.

Beneficence

This principle states that healthcare providers have a duty to be of benefit to a patient.

Non-Maleficence

“Do No Harm”—healthcare providers should not intentionally create a harm or injury to a patient.

Justice

Justice in healthcare requires the equity and equal distribution of allocation of healthcare resources.

Considering these ethical principles, Dr. Nduom says that the applications of these to correctional health facilities are everywhere you look. The healthcare of incarcerated people is lacking in many ways in reference to the above principles. Incarcerated patients don’t have the freedom to choose when to see a doctor, when to see a specialist, or consider what medications might be available to them. The COVID-19 pandemic has worsened these inequities as incarcerated people are prevented from following basic COVID-19 practices like social distancing and adequate handwashing.

The applications of these ethical principles extend beyond those who are incarcerated, into the community in regards to criminal justice. “So it’s very difficult to treat a community that is suffering from substance abuse disorders, when there’s an adversarial relationship between the people that are are dealing with this problem and law enforcement. So when there are laws in many cases not equitable laws that treat substance abuse disorder as a criminal habit, as opposed to a disorder, people can’t get the care. So when we see that that’s something that we need to intervene in and influence,” says Dr. Nduom.

Dr. Nduom also calls out the fact that incarcerated people are made to perform labor at miniscule or nonexistent wages, like for example to staff call centers for democratic candidate Mike Bloomberg’s campaign. People in these scenarios aren’t given things like ergonomic workstations that are required under employee protection laws—they are exploited for cheap labor and their health can suffer as a consequence.

Do No Harm, and prevent harm from others

For Dr. Nduom, his job as a neurosurgical oncologist means that he must Do No Harm in the wards and seeing his patients. But it also means that he must use his position as a physician to leverage power and prevent harm that is done to patient populations that he might not see directly, like the incarcerated and those whose interactions with the criminal justice system leave them with mental and physical health consequences.

What’s Next

Since Dr. Nduom’s session, the Black Lives Matter movement grew and strengthened again in the face of George Floyd’s murder, which evoked memories for many of Eric Garner’s—which initially led to the foundation of Physicians for Criminal Justice Reform.

Dr. Nduom will be with us again for #AMSACon2021 to share Criminal Justice Reform in 2021: Great Challenges Create Great Opportunities.

You can sign up here to gain access to the full recording of our #AMSACon2020 session, and be sure to join us this year for the followup session and many more.

About Dr. Edjah Nduom

Dr. Edjah Nduom is a fellowship-trained neurosurgical oncologist and physician-activist. In his academic practice, he operates on brain and spinal tumor patients while investigating novel treatments for brain tumor patients. Dr. Nduom obtained his B.S. in Biomechanical Engineering at Stanford University in 2002 and subsequently obtained his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2006. Dr Nduom then pursued neurosurgical training in the Department of Neurosurgery at Emory University and was awarded an NIH R25 Research Development Grant during his residency. In 2012, he completed an in-folded Research Fellowship in Neurosurgical Oncology at NIH. Dr Nduom finished his neurosurgical training in 2013 and then pursued an additional Neurosurgical Oncology Fellowship at UT MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, where he was awarded the Jesse H. Jones Fellowship in Cancer Education.

Dr. Nduom has held numerous leadership positions over his career. He was the President of the Medical Student Government at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, where he was also an active member of AMSA and the Student National Medical Association. In 2015, he founded Physicians for Criminal Justice Reform, Inc. a 501c3 non-profit organization focused on eliminating the damaging health consequences that can result from negative interactions with the criminal justice system. He was recently named one of the National Minority Quality Forum’s 40 under 40 Leaders in Minority Health. He is also a member of the Board of Directors for the National Brain Tumor Society and the Society for Neuro-Oncology of Sub-Saharan Africa.